Sex, lies and iconography

Edmund White's National Portrait Gallery talk on the importance of "literature, friends and homosexual desire on David Hockney's work" began with a confession that White had only met the artist twice. But both times were "revealing". The first was in the apartment of an opera designer in New York where they argued about Fragonard. "I was surprised that he was interested in Fragonard, but then I thought that the paintings often did resemble stage sets, which tied in." The second time was at a dinner party held by Stephen Spender's widow, and White still associates Hockney with Spender, Auden and Isherwood even though he is a generation younger. "But he dealt with gay culture and iconography as a subject-matter in a far more open way, although Isherwood was also pretty open." White is currently planning a book on high culture in 1970s New York - "not The Ramones and downtown, but the uptown stuff" - and says that even then many gay artists would not come out. "I asked the poet John Giorno, who knew everybody, why this was so, and he said 'that's why they were rich and we were poor'. It paid. Warhol might have been right when he said that frigid people make it."

&183; But not so in the case of Hockney, as has been most recently proved by the 90,000 visitors who have already seen his NPG Portraits show, which runs until January 21 (details at npg.org.uk). White quoted Hockney on his student days saying he was partly making propaganda for "something that hadn't been propagandised, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality." He then cited the Walt Whitman-inspired series of works which included Doll Boy (1960-61) in which a code taken from Leaves of Grass spelled out the letters CR in homage to Cliff Richard who had recently had a hit with "Living Doll". "But you are still not really supposed to see these things in an artist," explained White. "Saying someone is gay somehow makes them less universal. But surely saying Toni Morrison is black doesn't make her any less universal. So I'm going to keep saying it." White ran through a history of west-coast gay culture from the postwar beach communities and "early beefcake magazines" peopled by young men recently released from prison - "which would explain all the bad teeth and tattoos" - to Hockney's swimming pools and shower scenes. He particularly praised Hockney's ability to "normalise" gay lives and not play his subject - even in erotic etchings inspired by Cavafy poems - purely for shock value. "In his famous double portraits Hockney tended to alternate gay and straight couples. And in both sets he said there was always one who looked permanent and one who looked like they were just visiting."

· Questions from the floor led to the role of gay autobiography in making art; and then Proust. "The process of telling your story is important," White said. "The way it used to work was that you would meet someone, have sex and then have this pillow talk which would invariably get around to how you had come out. It was an important thing to people and sometimes extraordinarily difficult, especially a few decades ago, so everyone was very practised in telling their story and listening to other people's." White, who has written a biography of Proust, said Proust referred to his "giant giant" book as his autobiography when talking about it to friends, "even though he had dramatically changed all the details of his life to the extent that virtually everyone in the book is gay apart from him". Asked whether Proust's asthma was code for his sexuality, White thought not. "He really was asthmatic. But it did turn him into a recluse and an observer." And did his sexuality affect his style? "Hiding your sexuality teaches you to lie and to be creative. When I worked at Time magazine and I wanted to talk to my colleagues about my life, I had to lie. The six-foot blond man became a five-foot brunette woman. And then you had to remember and integrate all these lies. Wonderful training for writing fiction."NW